The complexity of oil field operations continues to increase with no end in sight. Each department in oil field operations (for example: production, maintenance and engineering) further increases the complexity due to the fact that each department has its own methodology and specialized tools to achieve their individual goals.
However, in order to effectively and efficiently manage overall oil field operations, it is necessary that these different departments combine their efforts. This cooperation of different departments requires sharing and coordination of the flow of information between all department participants, which is critical to the success of a common goal. There are no integrated, ready-to-use processes to assist department managers in setting up an infrastructure to facilitate an integrated communication between different departments.
Although many different tools for analysis exist today, these tools are typically focused on solving departmental specific issues. In addition, these different tools are typically not compatible with each other so that it is difficult to share information between the different tools. Thus, an operations manager may find it difficult to visualize the whole picture since there is no single tool for viewing the information generated by all of the various tools.
Communication and collaboration between departments is still typically performed as it has always been, i.e., either by getting together in person around a whiteboard or by traditional means of communication such as telephones. As a result, department managers spend a lot of their working time in meetings or on the phone exchanging information, such as scheduling information and the like. In general, the time spent on collaboration increases directly with the complexity of the work that needs to be done. The problem with typical collaboration methods is that they tend to be error-prone, inefficient, temporary, expensive and very risky. Some critical areas that are affected by the problematic ad-hoc collaboration are as follows:
The first critical area of concern is safety. Perhaps the most dangerous situation a company can face in the producing field is one where simultaneous operations are involved, especially where drilling, production, and construction crews are all working on the same site.
The second critical area is in re-developing inactive petroleum field/wells. Return to production (RTP) and well workover activities must be maintained on schedule to prevent slowing production start-up. Specific examples of manual independent non-integrated processes for scheduling include: facility maintenance work, cyclic steam, service rig, workover rig, drilling, new construction, and survey. If maintenance work is being performed on a certain piece of equipment without all affected departments being advised, serious safety issues could arise in the field for work crews having incorrect information. This obviously can lead to disastrous consequences.
Scheduling and executing these well and facility operations safely and optimally makes all work visible to everyone, eliminates time consuming creation and updating of multiple manual schedules, and eliminates the time required for making and maintaining a schedule and refocus that effort towards better execution.
Thus it is desirable to overcome the above mentioned problems and to provide a method for increasing safety and efficiency in managing oil field operations and diagnosing production problems in an oil field.